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1 In 6 New Medical Specialists Say They Can’t Find Work

Established specialists may also be reluctant to share resources such as operating room time. Lack of adequate career counselling and personal choices about type and location of practice when new graduates have family responsibilities (spousal employment, caring for children or elderly parents) that make it harder to move to job opportunities. Half of respondents in 2012 said they hadn’t received any careercounselling. Dr. Christine Herman is a recently trained cardiac surgeon. She is like about 31 per cent of new specialists who said they chose not to enter the job market but instead pursued more training, which they hoped would make them more employable. Herman said medical schools and the provinces and territories need to do a better job of workforce planning. “I think that the training programs aren’t in sync with the needs that are out there,” Herman said. “Long-term planning, committee planning for job availability is needed.” Steven Lewis, a health policy consultant based in Saskatchewan who was not involved in the study, thinks the situation willworsen. “I think that there is no question that … almost doubling medical school enrolments since the late 1990s combined with easier paths to licensure for international medical grads was the wrong thing to do. We didn’t think it through as a country.” Just under 20 per cent of recently certified specialists said they’d look for work outside of Canada, which could promote a “brain drain” to the U.S., the report’s authors said. Dr. Andrew Padmos, chief executive officer of the Royal College, said more research and consultation needs to be done to understand the challenge. The college would like to see a pan-Canadian think-tank to plan the health workforce. Australia, Britain and the U.S.